The response to last week’s blog has been amazing: people were completely outraged! And this was so weird (lovely !!, but weird) to me, because my getting blocked by students at my University didn’t even make me that angry: it wasn’t an unprecedented event. But you were all so shocked and furious! So, I realise, that you have no idea of just how poorly your disabled community is treated…

So let’s actually talk about disability and society, and let’s first take the idea of ‘looking’ disabled. Well, I don’t ‘look’ disabled. But the fact that I don’t has had serious consequences on the way society treats me.

There are two instances from Secondary School relating to this which particularly stand out for me. The first was when I was in Year 7: I was 11 years old and I’d recently developed a blister on my foot from walking too much, or having a fold in my sock, or something else tedious. (Yes, folds in socks can shove me in a wheelchair for months: it’s that stupid.) So in an attempt to avoid going into my wheelchair, I started to use the lift for disabled students to cut down my walking.

I was outside the lift one afternoon on the way to my next lesson with my best friend when my Deputy Headteacher came over and asked me what I was doing. I politely explained how I had a note from my parents, that I had a blister and that I had to use the lift. She didn’t look at my note, and she wasn’t interested when I started to lift my trousers so she could see my shoes. Instead, she yelled at me saying ‘a blister?! I’ve never heard such a thing! You’re stopping disabled students from using this lift!’. So I went to lesson in floods of tears: completely humiliated.

In this moment I didn’t ‘look disabled’ to my Deputy Headteacher: I didn’t have a noticeable body deformity, sound disabled, nor was I in a wheelchair. Flash-forward 2 weeks however, and I was in a wheelchair…no challenges as to why I was using the lift then…

The other memory I have is from being in Year 10 – the 3rd time I was in a wheelchair at Secondary School. My friends were pushing me through the halls to our lesson, and a student I didn’t know saw us. He shouted ‘piss off! I saw you walking last week, get out of that thing!’ at me across the hallway. I was stunned but my friends shouted back at him and we kept moving. Clearly, to this boy I was a liar; I was the person the media and government demonise as ‘abusing disability services and benefits’, and he took this moment to publicly expose my lie.

…

The world is constantly fed this finite version of what it is to be disabled: what it looks like, what it sounds like and what it feels like. But nobody ever takes the time to work out whether this stereotype is true. So just think about how many people you know without a disability: are they all the same? Do they all have the same bodies and personalities and emotions and ideas? Now think about applying that to disabled people. Do we all have the same disabilities? Do people who even fall under the same type of disability, have the same variation of that disability? Do we all look the same? Sound the same? Feel the same?

The answer is clearly ‘no’. Still, we’re grouped into one blob and are treated poorly by people and institutions who take very little time to try and actually understand us.

I’ve never been bullied directly because I’ve always had people standing up for me, and I’ve always had the confidence to stand up for myself. But I’ll always be vulnerable to discrimination by institutions and the general public because of an unwillingness of people to sit down and actually learn about things they know nothing about.

If you’re outraged by my experiences then start learning about other people’s, because I’m such a privileged white girl and my exposure to discrimination is nowhere near as bad as it gets. Trust me, you know more disabled people than you think, and you have more preconceptions about disability than you recognise.